
ORATION 



BEFORE THE 



CllY AUTHOEITIES OF BOSTON, 

I 

, '- ' ON THE 

FOURTH OF JULY, 1872. 



By Cff.lRLES FRANCIS ADAMS, Jr. 




BOSTON: 
rtocK:^v^Ei^L & CHXjRCiiiLL, CITY iprM]srTER's, 

122 Washingtiin Street. 

1872. 




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AN 



ORATION 



BEFORE THE 



CITY AUTHORITIES OE BOSTON, 



ON THE 



FOURTH OF JULY, 1872 



"S 



Br CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS, Jr. 




BOSTON : 

ROCK^W^KILIL. & CHTURCHILL,, CITY I'RIIN-arEIE-Sa 

122 Washington Street. 

1872. 



1872^ 



CITY OF BOSTON. 



In Board of Aldermen, July 8, 1872. 
Resolved^ That the thanks of the City Council are due, 
and they are hereby tendered, to Charles Francis Adams, 
Jr., for his exceedingly eloquent and interesting oration de- 
livered before the municipal authorities of this City on the 
fourth of July ; and that he be requested to furnish a copy 
for publication. 

Passed. Sent down for concurrence. 

S. LITTLE, Chairman. 



In Common Council, July 11, 1872. 
Concurred. 

M. F. DICKINSON, Jr., President. 



Approved July 11, 1872. 

WILLIAM GASTON, Mayor. 



ORATION 



5><KC 



In the neighboring graveyard, — within a stone's 
throw of the spot where we are gathered together, 
— rest the remains of ^ye men whose violent death, 
more than a century ago, in what is still the chief 
commercial street of our city, stirred to its depths the 
heart of the country. 'No monument, the work of 
human hands, marks the common grave of the victims 
of what is still known as the Boston Massacre, but 
over it the elm trees spread their graceful branches, 
beneath whose protecting shade in the heart of the 
city they lie, unknown and unnoticed. With the 
memorable event of March 5th, 1770, through 
which the names of five rioters in an obscure provin- 
cial town became inseparably connected with one of 
the great epochs in history, originated the custom of 
this annual address before the authorities of the town 
and city of Boston. A year ago the first century 
was completed. Through your favor it has devolved 
upon me to celebrate the opening of the second. 

Standing thus, as it were, upon the threshold of a 



6 ORATIOlSr. 

new cycle, memory cannot but revert to those who, 
m response to your summons, have addressed the 
citizens of Boston during the century which has now 
elapsed. The roll is indeed a distinguished one. In 
its record of honorable and famihar names is read the 
history of Massachusetts, — almost of America. Pa- 
triots all, — to-day they pass before us in solemn pro- 
cession. As is meet and proper here in ^ew Eng- 
land, — representing in his person that principle of 
free schools which hath ever been the rock of her 
salvation and the source of her prosperity, — Master 
James Lovell, then principal of the Boston Latin 
School, leads all the rest; — and, as if nothing should 
be wanting to make that first occasion typical of the 
time and of the race, both education and religion 
were inseparably associated with it, for the master 
of the Latin School spoke from the pulpit of the 
Old South Church. 

After Master Lovell follow famous names, — I 
might almost say familiar faces. As regards the 
celebration of 1772, occurring second in order, and 
exactly one hundred years ago. Gov. Hutchinson has 
recorded in his history, that " Mr. Adams had been 
pressed to pronounce the oration upon this occasion, 
but declined it; and Dr. "Warren, who afterwards lost 
his life at Bunker's Hill, and whose popularity was 
increasing, undertook it. Though he gained no 



JULY 4, 1872. _ 7 

great applause for his oratorical abilities, yet the 
fervour, which is the most essential part of such com- 
positions, could not fail of its eifect upon the minds 
of the great concourse of people present." Samuel 
Adams and Joseph "Warren ! — to use the words of Dan- 
ton, " names tolerably well known in the history of the 
revolution." Stately John Hancock then passes be- 
fore us, the ideal representative of a race of formal and 
polished gentry now wholly extinct. Thacher, Mor- 
ton, Austin, Tudor andMinot succeed; once more we 
see and hear Harrison Gray Otis, that famous mod- 
erator whose silvery eloquence through so many 
years fascinated the town-meetings in Faneuil Hall; 
brave old Josiah Quincy again stands before 
us, instinct with his fiery nature, — municipal 
integrity personified; Ohanning, Savage, Dexter, 
Lyman, Loring, Gray, and Curtis; Sprague, Hil- 
lard and Holmes, all challenge attention; while scat- 
tered among the rest, appear Lemuel Shaw, whose 
ponderous sense and infinite learning shed so rich a 
lustre on the jurisprudence of the Commonwealth; 
John Gorham Palfrey, the faithful and erudite histo- 
rian of New England ; Charles Sumner, the deep glow 
of whose eloquence has burned his name into the his- 
tory of emancipation and of his native land ; Horace 
Mann, the martyr to an unselfish devotion in the great 
cause of education; and Edward Everett, the last ech- 



8 OEATIOIS^. 

oes of whose musical rhetoric seem yet to linger in the 
recesses of this hall, as if loth to die away from the 
scene of their magical triumphs. 

One by one these my predecessors pass before you, 
each laying his gift upon the altar. Teachers, Gen- 
erals, Senators, Goyernors of the Commonwealth, 
Presidents of the Continental Congress, and of the 
United States ; merchants, scholars, physicians, divines, 
soldiers, and jurists; poets, historians, and statesmen, 
— the long roll-call of those who in turn have 
answered to your call is well calculated to fill your 
hearts with honest pride, as you thus enumerate the 
famous progeny of the ancient town. To me^ how- 
ever, their latest successor, they teach a lesson of 
modesty, — I might almost say of deep humility. 
Their presence speaks to me of my shortcomings, 
and causes me to feel how much more eloquent than 
any words or thoughts of mine is the memory of the 
silent voices of the past. 

And yet it is no easy task to restrain the imagina- 
tion, or to put a curb upon the fancy, as the mind 
reverts to that memorable panorama which has 
swept before the eyes of your century of orators. 
Who could fitly portray it? — The majestic organ 
notes of Webster can no more roll out in sonorous 
music in answer to your call; nor can the clarion 
voice and exquisite periods of Everett be sum- 



JULY 4, 1872. ' y 

moned to the task. They would have been equal to it. 
Others may, perhaps^ shadow forth a feeble outline 
of the great picture; but where is the majestic sweep 
of the brash, and the warm sunset coloring, which 
alone reveal the hand of the master ! Yet a precedent 
is not wanting. Ninety-seven years ago an orator, 
whose gorgeous language replete with philosophic 
thought has excited the mingled admiration and 
despair of three generations of the English-speaking 
race, lifted the veil from such a picture in all its con- 
summate perfection of finish. He imagined a kindly 
angel, standing fourscore years before by the cradle 
of the aged Bathurst, and there opening to him the 
material wonders which were to pass before his 
eyes, ere yet he was to taste of death. Well might 
Burke, as he dropped the veil over his immortal 
picture, exclaim, that if this had then been foretold, 
would it not have required all the sanguine cre- 
dulity of youth and all the fervid glow of enthu- 
siasm to create belief in it! Yet how commonplace, 
how uninspiring, were the events which had trans- 
pired and the results which had been achieved 
during the life of Bathurst, compared with those 
which crowded in rapid sequence before the eyes of 
that venerable Samaritan, who passed away a few days 
since within our city, on the threshold of his hun- 
dredth year! Born while the memory of the Boston 



10 OKATIOI^. 

massacre was fresh in the minds of the citizens, 
in the very year in which "Warren, with the shadow 
of his coming death already upon him, poured forth 
before his fellow-colonists his expression of that 
love of liberty, which was so soon to hurry him, a 
Major General and yet a volunteer, to die on 
Bunker's Hill, — born before one drop of the blood 
of any armed man had yet been shed in the momen- 
tous struggle then so nearly impending, — what a cen- 
tury of thick-coming events and swiftest progress was 
destined to pass before his eyes, ere that infant was 
to taste of death! Our own revolution, the trans- 
planting of the trees of liberty to Europe, the awful 
resurrection of France, the cagmanoles, the guillotine, 
the reign of terror, — until, at last, a maniac nation 
flung in the face of the banded monarchs of Europe 
the head of a King. Then Bonaparte passed before 
the eyes of a frightened world, and four continents 
trembled beneath the tread of his legions. When 
the guard broke at Waterloo, he who so re- 
cently died had just concluded his forty-third 
year* but he who saw the meteor of the l^apoleons 
flash up in the bright blaze of Lodi was destined 
to see it smoulder away in the foul smoke of Sedan. 
The close of that life was to witness events even 
more portentous than its beginning; again his own 
country was to be racked by civil war, and, before 



JULY 4, 1872- 11 

the century was complete, France was once more 
to be devastated, and the very pillars of civilization 
were to tremble under the terrible throes of a mod- 
ern Enceladus. 

And yet these were but the noisy outward inci- 
dents of a century, which, amid the ever-recurring 
din of arms, has contributed more than any other 
since the birth of recorded time to the sum of 
human possessions. "Within its term of years a few 
patient, thoughtful men, — undisturbed amid the 
noisy ring of arms or the clatter of politicians' 
tongues, — taking no note of voluminous state 
papers, of treatises on the abstract functions of 
government, or of changes of dynasty and power, — 
within these years those silent men from within 
the quiet recesses of their shops and their 
laboratories have reorganized our world. Steam, 
the loom, electricity, the newspaper! — In presence 
of such controlling forces as these, how small and 
immaterial, — - what very dust in the balance, — are 
the labored contrivances of statesmen : — not wars, 
nor revolutions, nor state craft, but a continued and 
successful application of science to every art or act 
of ordinary life, — whether of peace or of war, — 
must constitute the lasting claim of the century 
which has now elapsed to the grateful memory of 
those which are to come. One rub of that brightly 



12 ORATION". 

burning lamp, and the very yapor was compressed 
into a slave more docile and potent than he who 
obeyed the imagined behests of Aladdin; — a wave 
of the magician's wand, and the thunderbolt of Jove 
was turned into the post-boy of man ; — a glance of 
that penetrating eye, and the very rocks revealed their 
secrets, while the sacred traditions which sixty centu- 
ries of faith had graven into the human mind became 
as the baseless fabric of a vision. 

]Nor is there any country in the whole family of 
nations which has proved so sensitive to the touch of 
this animating spirit as our own. It has been to us 
at once the source of all our greatness and of all our 
woes. It was Arkwright who, through one invention, 
inaugurated the reign of the Cotton King; — it was 
Stephenson and Fulton and Morse who, by othei's, 
enabled us to end it. Thus, turning sharply from a 
past so full of great results accomplished we find 
ourselves in presence of a future big with possibili- 
ties, but seething with revolution and instinct with a 
spirit of change. In that future two things only can 
we Americans regard as fixed. We are to remain 
one countiy, and that country is entering upon an 
era of material prosperity such as the utmost imagin- 
ings of other times have failed to picture. That we 
are destined to remain a united people, is a proposi- 
tion which few would be disposed to deny, and which 



JULY 4, 1872- 13 

it would not be profitable to discuss. This point 
was settled in the issue of the war of the rebellion, — 
by that dread ordeal of battle from whose decision there 
lies no appeal. That, as a people, we are now enter- 
ing upon an era of material prosperity to which no 
history, even though that history be our own, affords 
a parallel, is apparent from a few considerations. A 
century ago, Edmund Burke, after depicting, as he 
only could depict, the progress already made by those 
whom he described as being, but a few years before, 
" a set of miserable outcasts, not so much sent as 
thrown out on the bleak and barren shore of a deso- 
late wilderness three thousand miles from all civilized 
intercourse," and who were still, even when he 
spoke, " a people, as it were, but in the gristle, and 
not yet hardened into the bone of manhood," — even 
then, while measuring in his comprehensive mind the 
progress that infant people had already made, the 
great orator exclaimed in the House of Commons, 
" And pray, Sir, what is there in the world that is 
equal to it?" But what w^ould Burke have said, — 
what language could even he have found to express 
the possibilities of the future, — could he in prophetic 
vision have advanced with that growing people of 
whom he spoke, and, standing where we now stand, 
have measured its material future by its past? — Could 
even he have gazed undazzled upon the glowing 
radiance of that still rising sun? 



14 ORATio:Nr. 

Three fixed conditions assure to us this material 
future of which the realities will beggar exaggera- 
tion. And, lest I may seem to be trenching on that 
excessive national glorification, which is the pre- 
scriptive privilege of this day, let me further add 
that to one only of these conditions can we, as a peo- 
ple, claim any peculiar credit to ourselves. These 
three conditions are, a soil of boundless richness, — 
in which is concealed a mineral and a vegetable 
wealth which many generations will be unable fully 
to develop, and which untold centuries cannot ex- 
haust, — upon the more complete and rapid develop- 
ment of which a singularly intelligent, energetic and 
determined race is day by day bringing to bear those 
last and most perfect appliances of science of which 
our fathers did not dream, and in the use of which 
we as yet have acquired but the proficiency of nov- 
ices. These premises are no less simple than undeni- 
able, but these once conceded, — and from the con- 
clusion there is no escape. The purely material 
development of the coming century will in its results 
as much excel the last, as did the last excel that 
which preceded it, which, also, in its time had called 
forth the wondering ejaculations of Burke. 

This, however, is but one side of the picture, upon 
which I do not purpose now to dwell; it is the stimu- 
lating and the glowing side, but it carries with it a 



JULY 4, 1872. 15 

reverse. There is no ordeal to which the nation, any 
more than the man, the aggregate any more than 
the individual, can be subjected, so trying, so crucial, 
as the sudden accumulation of wealth. The richest 
soils ever bring forth the most profuse of harvests, 
but it is amid their rank vegetation that the noxious 
herbs spring up, and the venomous re]3tiles lurk. As 
with Rome, so will it be with us, — the Seine will 
surely mix with our Hudson. Already have we 
tasted the impure waters of the modern Orontes, and 
as yet the sluice-gates^ are hardly lifted. We may 
rest assured that the trials of the future will be ex- 
actly proportioned to the advantages of the future, 
and our responsibilities will be measured only by our 
opportunities. Then, as now and heretofore, eternal 
vigilance will be the price of liberty, and to the na- 
tion no more than to the individual will it profit any- 
thing, though it gain the whole world, so it lose its 
own soul. 

It is to this grave responsibility — a responsibility 
under which we now stagger to the verge oftentimes 
of falling, and which, nevertheless, is ever increasing 
upon us — that I seek to call your attention to-day. 
In the coming time a peculiar and unequal portion 
of this great burden is imposed upon us here and 
upon our Commonwealth, — a burden consciously 
assumed within the last ten years. You all know 



16 ORATION. 

how, in the inscrutable ways of Providence, two 
distinct seminal principles of a future civiUzation 
were planted on the silent shores of this continent. 
One fell at Plymouth, the other at Jamestown. You 
all know how in the slow progress of time, these 
seminal principles fructified and brought forth after 
their kind, and how the progeny of each, in obedi- 
ence to primal scriptural command, went forth to 
multiply and replenish the earth, and subdue it. It 
is not pleasant upon this day, nor is it necessary to 
now dilate upon the fundamental differences which 
from the first existed between the social and indus- 
trial organizations of these two great columns of 
advancing civilization. All now realize that those 
differences were of a nature which did not admit of a 
compromise, — which were as old as civilization itself, 
— and that, as the two columns converged, the irre- 
pressible conflict between them could only result in the 
mastery of the one or of the other. It was from the 
beginning written in the book of fate that either the 
Plymouth theories or the Jamestown theories of 
society, of government, and of the rights and duties 
and dignity of man should wholly and exclusively pre- 
dominate over this continent; — there was not room 
for both. The Titanic struggle between them was 
destined to culminate in the lifetime of our genera- 
tion, and its terrible history and decisive result will 



JULY 4, 1872. 17 

ever be fresh in our memory. These have been 
sufficiently dwelt upon here and elsewhere, and have 
received already their meed of eloquence. The 
weighty responsibility, the great load of duty 
which that decisive victory imposed upon those in 
whose hands thenceforth rested the destinies of a 
continent has hardly received its due consideration. 
For Massachusetts, however, this theme is one not 
lightly to be ignored. This ancient Commonwealth, 
more than any of her sisters, through the long stages 
of debate, unrest and unconscious preparation which 
preceded the conffict, typified one of the parties to it, 
and, true to the fundamental theories of her social 
existence, held up the banner with no faltering hands. 
The battle won, and the column victorious, there re- 
mained to her no escape from the future. She may 
prove unequal to the event, she cannot abdicate 
responsibility for it. At the bar of the most remote 
posterity, when other nations, with other customs and 
manners, shall people an America, then teeming with 
undreamed-of millions, — nations which will read of us 
and of our deeds in the full, strong light of long sub- 
sequent events, as we now read of the civil wars of 
Greece and Rome, — at the bar of that posterity 
Massachusetts must be prepared to answer for the 
use now to be made of the victory so recently 
achieved. 



18 ORATION. 

We are thus plunging into a future of which we 
are only sure that it is to be one of immeasurable 
possibilities lor good and evil, and in which it is in- 
cumbent upon us to play a leader's part. Can 
the old Commonwealth be made to retain during the 
next century the position she has so firmly held 
against all comers during the last? — Numerically, be 
it remembered, her destiny is already decided. Long 
since distanced by her younger sisters, by her ov/n 
offspring even, Massachusetts is doomed to pass fur- 
ther and further from the number of those communi- 
ties which influence results through the enumera- 
tions of the census. Iler future appeal must lie to 
intelligence and not to numbers, to reason and not to 
votes. With the Commonwealth standing thus on 
the verge of the great future, freighted to the water's 
edge with responsibility, shorn of numerical impor- 
tance, it is for this generation in the immediate pres- 
ent to take final counsel as to the course in which 
her safety and her honor lie. Fortunately, that 
course is a direct and simple one, if we, her children, 
have but the will and virtue to pursue it. It lies in 
the intelligent appreciation of the few great princi- 
ples of brotherhood, duty and faith, in which our Com- 
monwealth was founded, and in a firm, persistent ad- 
herence to them. We, too, "must put our feet in the 
tracks of our forefathers, where we can neither wan- 
der nor stumble." 



JULY 4, 1872. 19 

'Nor is this rule of conduct — so trite, so common- 
place — one easy to pursue. A fidelity, under the 
temptations of great success, to the simple tradi- 
tions of youth has ever proved the most difficult 
trial of maturer life. Nor with us is the present 
free from doubt. The era of recent change has 
affected Massachusetts as it has affected few other 
communities; with the exception of her traditions, 
there is little within her limits, or in the way of life 
of her children, which is as it formerly was. What, 
indeed, was that Massachusetts of a hundred years 
ago which excited the glowing encomium of Burke, 
and of which we read and talk so much, and 
know so little? — The boundaries of the Common- 
wealth were the same then as now, but it was the 
home of another civilization. There is no need to 
laud the bygone days, or to bemoan the degeneracy 
of the present time; we have our virtues and our 
defects, and our fathers before us had theirs; but 
then and now the State is the aggregate of its citi- 
zens, and their modes of life must shape its history. 
To know the reason of its institutions, we must 
study that social existence which is the soil from 
whence they grew. To judge of their permanence, 
we must understand those fundamental social and 
industrial conditions which were essential to their 
origin, and without which they cannot long exist. 



20 oeatio:n". 

Therefore is it very incumbent upon us, if we would 
truly forecast the future, maturely to reflect upon 
the past as well as upon the present, that we may 
appreciate into whose hands is passing that ark of 
the covenant in which are garnered up the saving 
traditions of our race. 

The Massachusetts of the Boston Massacre was a 
vigorous community of some two hundred and seventy 
thousand souls, or a poor twenty thousand more 
than are now numbered within the wards of this 
single municipality alone. Its people were a 
hardy, thrifty race, who tilled an ungrateful 
soil and navigated a stormy sea; self-educated, 
self-sustaining, self-reliant, they looked to no gov- 
ernment for protection to themselves or to their 
industry, only too grateful if the harsh mother who 
had cast them forth upon the wilderness would 
abandon them to work out their own destiny in 
their own hard, simple way. They were not a . 
pleasant race, — their stern life was a poor school 
for the development of gentle amenities; their exist- 
ence had been one long, hard struggle with a 
rugged soil and scarce more rugged sea, until the 
biting east wind of the bleak 'New England shore 
seemed to have eaten into their souls, developing a 
stern, unsympathetic race; dogged, tenacious, un- 
yielding and crabbed; overflowing with energy, 



JULY 4, 1872. 21 

full of resource, and impregnated with a deep love 
of liberty. 'Not that their liberty verged upon 
license, — that indeed was most remote from their 
conceptions; theirs was a grave, well-ordered, 
simple Commonwealth, in which they themselves 
laid down the law, whether on their own hearth- 
stones or in their own town-halls. Theirs was the 
purest, truest democracy which the world as yet 
has seen; no doctrinaire, no theorist, no speculative 
framer of constitutions or professional philanthro- 
pist sprinkled with sentimentalities the cradle of that 
hardy, native brat; — but it was the gnarly offspring 
of the farm and of the fishing-smack, and, like all 
pure things of native growth, it well preserved the 
flavor of the soil. Their life was not a joyous one, 
nor was it the life of towns; there was no city within 
the limits, of their State; their laws were simple, for 
their wants were few; their wealth lay in their lands 
and in their ships, and with them the richest were 
poor, and poorest lived in abundance. Such were 
the laborers in our early vineyard; they sowed and 
we have reaped; they labored, and we have entered 
into the fruits of their labors. 

How is it with the Commonwealth to-day? I 
would not decry the present. Our days are better 
than the days of our fathers ; our lines have fallen in 
pleasanter places. I would not, if I could, reverse 



22 ORATioisr. 

the wheels of time, nor seek to make the sun of prog- 
ress tarry in its course. I appreciate to the full the 
delights and advantages of this later day; its litera- 
ture, its science, and its art; its improved taste, its 
increased wealth, its cities, its theatres, its galleries 
of pictured art, and its stores of richest thought. It 
is not unnatural that we, too, should love to dally 'mid 
the soft delights of our Capua. ISl or can we of this 
generation well profess a fear lest the good moral 
fibre of our fathers has disappeared from their children. 
We, too, have seen a gallant nation spring to arms at 
the call of country, and, under a pure and sacred 
sense of duty, gr^sp sabre and musket, and bare its 
head in battle. Our children can never say that 
we were untrue to our traditions. And yet the 
old Commonwealth is gone! Where once two 
hundred and seventy thousand colonists tilled the 
soil and faced the sea, are now gathered together a 
milUon and a half of busy, bustling men, living in 
cities, working in factories, revelling in undreamed- 
of wealth, and struggling under harsh and hopeless 
poverty; a community becoming more and more 
sharply divided between those who have, and those 
who have not; the responsibility and knowledge of 
government disappearing year by year with the old 
town meetings; ignorance and vice keeping steady 
pace with the increase of poverty, while the old 



JULY 4, 1872. 23 

ominous class-cries of other lands and darker days 
grow yearly more familiar to our unaccustomed ears. 
A century ago, seventy out of every hundred of the 
inhabitants of Massachusetts dwelt in communities 
numbering less than twenty-two hundred each, 
while but a single town in the province contained 
above five thousand souls. To-day — and this marks 
well the change — the majority dwell in communities 
of at least ten thousand each, while twenty-four 
cities and towns contain more than half of the 
inhabitants of the Commonwealth, one sixth of all 
of whom are citizens of Boston. Instead of the 
yeoman, sailor race, living in the open air and in 
close contact with nature, we have become a manu- 
facturing community whose teeming population, 
crowded into heated shops or noisy mills, tends 
incessantly the busy loom, or feeds the hungry 
furnace. "Whether we will or not, therefore, this 
grave problem is presented before us : — -a system of 
government, the growth of one form of social and 
industrial being, is to be preserved in another and 
wholly different form ; — the traditions of a scattered 
race of yeomen and fishermen are to be kept in vigor- 
ous life in an artisan community which is swarming 
to cities. 

Herein, as I take it, lies for us the political signifi- 
cance of that labor question which is yearly assuming 



24 OEATIOl^. 

such increased proportions. It is, in fact, the blind, un- 
conscious effort of a new social and industrial organi- 
zation to adapt to its needs the forms and traditions 
of another time. And yet, ualess I greatly err, I think 
it will be found that the social and political organiza- 
tion which we inherited from our fathers depended 
for its successful working upon two essential princi- 
ples, and upon two alone. These were a universal, 
practical, hard-headed education, not only in the 
knowledge taught in schools, but in that derived 
from an active contact with men and public affairs ; — • 
and next, and more important still, was the happy dis- 
tribution of property, which gave to the vast majority 
of citizens that dignity of proprietorship, which is the 
strongest guaranty of social and political stability. 
These were, — these are the solid corner-stones of 
our edifice. "While they rest undisturbed, the build- 
ing cannot fall. 

Of the first there is no need to speak. Massachu- 
setts is fully and finally committed to the cause of 
universal, — if need be, of compulsory education. 
Popular opinion and public and private wealth are 
ever ready to respond when that cord is struck. It 
is but necessary to point out defects, — whether ex- 
isting deficiencies or possible development not yet 
attained, — and already the work of reform is more 
than half accomplished. Whenever and wherever a 



JULY 4, 1872. 25 

real need exists for common schools, or high schools 
or normal schools; for academies or universities; for 
truant schools or industrial schools or public libraries, 
we may rest assured that not in our generation at 
least will the Commonwealth long be wanting to its 
record. More in this respect she cannot do. The 
grand old practical college of the public life is 
vanishing with the memory of town-meeting days. 
The active contact with nature and with men, that 
teaching which no coarse of lectures nor instruction 
from a normal school can at all replace, is inconsist- 
ent with the present modes of life. These grave 
deficiencies neither legislation nor public spirit can 
again make good. It remains for us to supply their 
place as best we may through that poor machinery of 
our schools, which we can yet control; — nor, if this 
is done, need we fear the grand result. A people 
trained in youth to the quick reception of new ideas 
may wander greatly from its path, but is never wholly 
lost. 

"When we pass on, however, to that other essential 
element to all real social or political stability, which 
is found only in the general contentment of the great 
mass of those for whose well-being all government 
exists, our horizon is not wholly free from clouds. 
They hang, indeed, lightly over the present, but it is 
the haze of to-day which betokens the storm of to- 



26 oratio:n^. 

morrow. The rapid increase of manufacturing pros- 
perity has hitherto implied the no less rapid increase 
of operative want, and a Commonwealth founded on 
manufactuies is as yet a house built on the sand. It 
thus becomes a necessity of our continued existence 
that the sense of proprietorship, the dignity of 
ownership, — that only immovable basis of free insti- 
tutions, — should somehow or in some way be widely 
disseminated through all classes in our State. This, 
however, can spring only from a consciousness in the 
great mass of the people that they individually have 
an interest in the vested accumulations of the whole. 
Our future Commonwealth is not to be governed by 
those who have a stake in the soil, and it is therefore 
incumbent upon us to extend the saving dignity 
which encompasses the land-owner to the operative as 
well, — it must belong to him who tends the loom no 
less than to him who follows the plough. Our Com- 
monwealth can only be governed by all of her chil- 
dren, absolutely equal before her law, and, that they 
may govern well, all should give their hostages to 
fortune. 

This is our latest problem. A new social system 
demands of us nothing less than an industrial reor- 
ganization, lest it result in a political decay. The 
lines of division in our community must not become 
horizontal • but, to prevent their becoming so, it is nee- 



JULY 4, 1872. 27 

essarj that labor and capital should be partners, that 
they may not be enemies; or, that failing, it is neces- 
sary that the laborers should own their own capital, 
and not the capitalists, labor. This mach was set- 
tled in the war of the rebelhon. It is not given us 
yet to see how this great result is to coma about, but 
we can rest assured that it will not come, about through 
any bombardment of rhetorical epigrams, nor yet 
through the noisy resolutions of strikes; it will 
not come to us through political action, nor yet 
through the passage of multitudinous laws in- 
tended to regulate the hours of human toil, 
or the value of human labor, or the demand for 
wealth; all these are but the barren product of 
that spirit of political tampering which has been de- 
scribed as the odious vice of restless and unstable 
minds. Not our generation, nor many succeeding 
ones, will see the millennium created by an act of 
Legislature, and ushered into being by the club of a 
constable. Far otherwise; the industrial and social 
reorganization essential to our future, like all far- 
reaching social movements, can only result from the 
combined and quiet action of an intelligent and de- 
termined people, attending in their own way to their 
daily work, and coldly disregarding all short cuts and 
royal roads to their promised land. It must be the 
result of the deep ground-swell of a steady purpose. 



28 OEATlOiN'. 

and "will never originate in the frothy eddies of an 
idle rhetoric. Germany has ah'eady tanght us one 
lesson; England is teaching us another. Both les- 
sons come to us as the still, small voice of reason and 
hope, making itself heard amid the noisy and profit- 
less tumult of passion. In those countries, a few 
among the ov^ners of labor have at last learned to 
co-operate, as w^ell as to combine. Are, then, the 
laborers of Germany and of Great Britain, — those 
whom we so constantly refer to in our vile political 
jargon as " the pauper labor of Europe, " — are they 
more intelligent or determined than those of Massa- 
chusetts? — Few at least, here, would care to main- 
tain it. Are they better endowed with means with 
which to further their experiments? — I cannot say; 
but with one hundred and sixty millions of wealth 
hoarded in the savings-banks of the Commonwealth, 
our people should have a sufficiency of capital. Yet 
the intelligent, self-reliant, determined children of 
Massachusetts hang backward in this great work, 
while others, in less fortunate lands, press to the 
front. Nevertheless, the work will yet be accom- 
plished, and what the savings-bank now is to the 
laboring class of Massachusetts, that and much more 
will the mill and the workshop be in the future. 
Here, and here alone, lies the solution of the prob- 
lem, — therein is the ark of salvation. 



JULY 4, 1872. 29 

An immutable law, wiser than any recorded upon 
human statute book, has decreed that every people 
may, in course of time, regulate its own destiny. 
]^o human power external to themselves can assist 
them greatly, and none can permanently retard 
them. To each community there ultimately comes, 
through government or notwithstanding govern- 
ment, such an industrial and social system as they 
themselves shall make. The future of Massachu- 
setts rests in the hands of the mass of her citizens, 
who now crowd together in towns, as their fathers 
lived apart in the country. It is for them to decide, 
for her and for themselves, whether they will here- 
after be dependents at the doors of corporations, and 
suppliants at the bar of the Legislature, or whether 
they will stand up in the honest dignity of 
independent manhood, and emancipate themselves. 
Capital is selfish and hard; indeed, if it ceased to 
be so, it would not long exist; it does not deal in 
sentiment; by the law of its being, against which it 
is childish to declaim, it buys where it can buy for 
least, and sells where it can sell for most; skill and 
muscle are but one portion of its raw material, as 
coal and cotton are another. It can be effectively 
approached in one way, and in only one. To deal 
successfully with it, labor has yet to prove one 
essential, vital postulate, — it must demonstrate 



30 OKATION. 

that labor is more profitable to capital as a partner, 
than as an employee. In these few words rest the 
whole issue of this great debate; but this it can 
never do, till it tries and fails, and fails and tries 
again, for nothing here will succeed but success. 
One great, co-operative triumph, the result of its 
own unassisted capital and its own directing brain, 
would thus outweigh to the labor of Massachusetts 
the results of a thousand successful strikes. At 
once a new Declaration of Independence, and 
another Bunker's Hill, through its stimulating 
impulse the self-reliant energy still native to the 
soil would again assert itself, and would go forth, 
refreshed and invigorated by its moral victory, to 
the encounter with those other trials which the 
future has in store. 

Still great changes are not easily or quickly 
wrought, nor is the period of transition apt to be 
a pleasant one. May we not, however, firmly trust, 
that the groans and contortions of the present are 
but the agony of travail? Truth is ever born out of 
error, and success most surely follows the patient 
study of failure. That in the future, the children 
of Massachusetts will no more be wanting to them- 
selves than they have proved to be in the past, we 
have as yet small ground to fear. With the burden 
comes the strength; the hour will find the man. 



JULY 4, 1872. 31 

When the time is ripe, unless the record of the 
past is to serve as a sad reproach to the future, more 
than one of her sons will rise up in Massachusetts, — 
a prophet in our Israel, — even as Horace Mann rose 
up a third of a century ago. The harvest was 
ready, and lo! — the reaper was there. The work 
that Mann did for education, these others will do 
for industry; they will reorganize it and infuse into 
its veins the rich blood of a better life; they will 
cause the workman on his bench to feel that he also 
has a property in his tools and in the workshop, 
the home of his labors; that he, too, owns a part of 
what results from his toil. By so doing, they will 
restore to labor its independence and its dignity; to 
the laborer, the great attributes of his republican 
manhood; to the State, the essentials of a continued 
stability. 

An intelligent people, all equal before the law, and 
laboring together in a community of interest, might 
throw a light defiance in the face of change. The 
forces of evil, though they include even civil corrup- 
tion, could not prevail against it. True to its early 
traditions, its early traditions would guide it in safety 
through the dark night of storm and disaster. 
And should Massachusetts now sustain herself and 
prove equal to the great occasion, when another 
century of orators shall have responded to your 



32 ORATION. 

call, my remote successor, after dwelling in purer 
accents upon the wonders which it shall have been 
the happy destiny of the coming generations to un- 
fold, may turn to his distant present, and there behold 
our ancient Commonwealth still retaining her place 
at the head of that proud column whose animating 
spirit went forth from her shores, and which he also 
in truth and in soberness may see as " a noble and 
puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man 
after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks; an 
eagle mewing her mighty youth, and kindling her 
undazzled eyes at the full mid-day beam." 



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